One of my man pages is not ranking and does not seem to exist.

[krivec8]

One of my main pages is not ranking and does not seem to exist. I  have gone through every tool on webmaster and yoast. I cannot find an error, but  every metric I know of says my page should be on the first page of my target search term. Moz graded it as an A, but It is not ranked on any page. Can someone please help?? my target search is "Jekyll Island Wedding Photographer" my home page shows up on page 2 but this page http://saintsimonsphotography.com/jekyll-island-wedding-photographer/ is my page that does not seem to exist.

I have never had this problem with any of my other businesses. Jekyll island is the next island over and I need this term to rank.

Thank you for any help.

[dohertyjf]

Hey John -

Thanks for coming here and asking your question. From my looks at your site as well, I don't see anything glaring that would keep that page from ranking.

Unfortunately, sometimes Google picks a random page to rank (on small sites like yours this is often the strongest on the site, which is the homepage) and seems unwilling to want to change that ranking page. A few thoughts for you on how to get the correct page ranking:

• Rewrite your content on this page. It is stuffed with keywords (your main keyword appears 10 times, "Jekyll Island" appears 30) and doesn't read naturally. You're writing for 2007-era search crawlers, not 2017-era users.
• Your site is way over-optimized. When I look at your About or Portfolio pages, why are these optimized for specific [wedding photographer] keywords? This doesn't make any sense for users.
• Build links to the page you want to rank. Get some local citations (from Better Business Bureaus, wedding venues, etc) to this page and I bet you'll pop in your rankings.
• Mention different venues where you have shot weddings in that area. This will help give semantic relevance to your page.

Hope that helps.

[krivec8]

Thank you for the reply. I was wondering if I needed to do just that. I have always tried to get all my bullets green on Yoast and had written that way. Writing is not my strong area at all and has always been a challenge. I will try and implement your points and really appreciate the feedback.

Thanks!!

[dohertyjf]

Hi there, I'd recommend looking into using Scripted for this if you're not a strong writer. You can get awesome content for quite cheap.

[Hurf]

Yep. Spot on advice from John. I always like to keep in mind how your page content would sound if you read it out loud. If you're not sure, do exactly that, preferably to a friend and get them to tell you when it sounds like you're labouring the point.

Always, ALWAYS make the user experience your primary focus. If you can clearly explain to the user what it is you're offering - without repeating yourself endlessly- then the search engines will be smart enough to pick this up. Now there's no harm in using your keyphrase (and synonyms) a couple of times throughout your content but only when it's needed for clarity.

I understand how Yoast's SEO plugin can give you green light fever, but as is often the case, less is more.